Clinton Weir's iPhone Apps

For starters, I'm Clinton Weir, a mid-20s American from Illinois. I graduate from high school in a small town in East Central Illinois. I spent a few years working odd jobs (for example, working in a customer service call center for a year) until I decided to go back to school, and got my Bachelor's Degree in Physics from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL. After graduating, I went to graduate school for a year but then realized that physics was not the right career path for me.

After leaving graduate school, I was faced with a difficult jobs market and the unemployment office denied my benefits, claiming that a teaching assistantship is not a real job. After fighting with them for a few months I finally ended up taking a part time job teaching English as a Second Language. This has been an interesting experience - these are people who have spent their whole lives wanting to come to America and so I am very happy helping them improve their English skills. Unfortunately, I am not very good at it and it is only part time so I have a lot of extra time.

For the first several months I made some efforts learning Chinese (the first language of most of my students) and learning about Economics (listening to podcasts for example). Then I got to playing around with my iPod Touch. There is some great software available for the iPhone OS! Diner Dash, Cooking Dash, I Love Katamari, etc. I found out that it is fairly easy to start developing iPhone apps - you just need to know some Objective C (and if you know C or C++ then you are halfway there) and download Xcode and iPhone SDK.

So that's my story - that's how I got here. It's a road paved with failure, but aren't they all?

Hello everyone. I have been developing for iPhone OS for 16 days and enjoyed every minute. Prior to that, I had very little experience programming - one semester learning C++ in college. Thanks to Apple's developer resources I have been able to learn very quickly. Thanks, Apple!

My newest app was submitted to Apple less than 20 minutes ago - it might take a few days to get through the approval process. Believe it or not, it took me just 4 hours to build the app from initial conception to final build - that's because it is a very simple (but, if you'll forgive me, ingenious) game concept. Each person start with 2 minutes on the clock. Their clock runs down during their own turn, during the next turn after their turn (to avoid the game devolving into keep-away) and any time their switch is turned to 'ON'.

When your turn comes up you can either flip a switch (flip your own switch off to stop your timer, or flip someone else's switch on to start their timer) or link your switch to someone else's. After linking your switch, anytime your switch gets flipped, the linked switch also gets flipped (and vice versa).

All told you are forced to make some difficult strategic decisions about how to propel yourself to the top without angering your opponents. It's an exciting, simple yet provocative game concept and I hope you will enjoy it.

This is my original game concept - if you want to develop a version for another platform please contact me first. Thanks!